Standing Ground’s grand debut at Paris Couture
For Fall-Winter 2026, the Irish designer Michael Stewart brought his London-based brand Standing Ground to the haute couture schedule with a studious proposal targeted at longevity. EE72 Fashion Critic Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
“You’ve spent your life waiting for this moment,” Scissor Sisters sang on the soundtrack during the Standing Ground finale in Paris on Monday night. The show marked Michael Stewart’s inauguration on the haute couture schedule, a moment he’s been working towards since winning the LVMH Savoir-Faire Prize in 2024. The lyrics to the song he played were preceded by the words of its title, “It can’t come quickly enough,” which were probably an ironic gesture on the Irish designer’s part, considering the evidently studious, long-gestated nature of the show. There was nothing rushed about this experience. Stewart staged it in the palatially gilded salons of his home country’s Parisian embassy, on the sassily named Rue Rude, and everyone was there.
If Standing Ground sounds like a manifesto, Stewart seems to work accordingly. The designer, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2017, founded the London-based label in 2022 with a language that felt almost archaeological in its purity: long, sculptural lines, dresses built like standing stones, and a devotion to the body as architecture. Fashion East gave him a London platform in 2023. Three years on, he’s assembled a dream team including Tallulah Harlech on styling, Piergiorgio del Moro on casting, Michel Gaubert on music, Duffy on hair and Daniel Sällström on make-up. The show played out like one of those fashion moments tailored to the history books: tight rows of guests in a hot room, their knees almost touching as the couture crept through the narrow passages.
It wasn’t that the collection unveiled something hugely unexpected, but that wasn’t the point. Rather, it was purely Standing Ground, on a couture stage: statuesque gowns, their drapes implanted with beads that gradually shifted in size along the physique. “It’s a technique I’ve been working on for quite a long time. I’ve used it in a myriad of different ways, and I think there’s something really nice about finding a technique and pushing it forward and developing it further and further,” Stewart said. “There’s so much richness when you start working on something. I think we shouldn’t feel pressure as designers to abandon everything and come up with something new every season.” Through this designer’s perfecting lens, those words rang true.
The show closed with Kristen McMenamy as the bride in a dress crafted in lace handmade in Ireland with support from the Irish Design and Crafts Council and the Heritage Council. “It’s called Carrickmacross lace, and it’s about heritage and craft-based skills in Ireland, and bringing them to a stage I feel they deserve to be in,” Stewart said, noting that the dress had had 26 hands on it for 4,000 hours. It was a fitting finale to a show that you wouldn’t have guessed was its first time at the couture rodeo. Among the grandes maisons and theatrical spectacles that fill these three days of larger-than-life fashion, these are the elements that keep haute couture feeling fresh and cutting-edge.
There’s so much richness when you start working on something. I think we shouldn’t
feel pressure as designers to abandon
everything and come up with something
new every season.
Michael Stewart
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